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Seattle professor sees hope in agriculture’s future

Soil degradation – the gradual depletion of nutrients and organic matter in the soil – is one of humanity's most pressing environmental problems. But it’s also one that can be solved, provided farmers start changing the way they interact with the soil.

That’s the message from David Montgomery, a University of Washington geologist and author of three books on soil erosion, degradation and regeneration.

Montgomery was in Sarnia earlier this week to speak on the subject, in a presentation supported by the Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association and funded by Ontario's Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

In the 40 years between 1945 and 1995, soil erosion and degradation caused the loss of nearly 430 million hectares of once-productive farmland – an area equivalent of the countries of India and China combined, he said.

With a 2015 United Nations Global State of Soil Assessment report noting the world is losing 0.3 per cent of its global food production capacity every year to soil erosion and degradation, Montgomery said the future will be bleak unless changes are made.

“That's actually a really scary number,” he said. “In a hundred years, if agriculture doesn't change, we could be on track to lose two-thirds of the arable land on this planet. We need to reverse these trends and we need to take this problem very seriously on a societal level because the consequences of not taking it seriously will be disastrous.”

Soil erosion played a significant role in the demise of many once-great societies, Montgomery said, including civilizations as diverse as classic Greece, ancient Rome, Neolithic Europe, the southern United States and the former empires of Central America.

While textbooks often tie soil erosion to the problem of deforestation, Montgomery came to a different conclusion after years of research for his book, Dirt.

The real culprit was long-term tillage.

“If there's a villain in the Dirt book, it's the plow,” Montgomery said. “We have relied on a practice for many centuries that makes land vulnerable to erosion. Tillage is an ancient practice... but what we have been doing is degrading soil faster than it's replenished. It's as true today as it was thousands of years ago. And we have to stop or else meet the same fate as these past societies.”

But shortly after writing Dirt, Montgomery said he became somewhat of a pessimist, believing the widespread acceptance of conservation agriculture practices would prove impossible. Yet inspiration and optimism later came from his own backyard.

After publishing the book, Montgomery and his wife Anne Bilk – a biologist and environmental planner – bought a house in Seattle and attempted to turn their barren backyard into a lush garden. After years of feeding a constant diet of organic matter, the soil quality of their once-desolate yard began improving and eventually the garden plants began growing to the point they blocked out their view of the neighbours.

It was that experience – which he and his wife wrote about in the book The Hidden Half of Nature – that turned Montgomery into a cautious optimist.

For his third book, Growing a Revolution, Montgomery travelled the world to talk to farmers who had successfully regenerated their soil, to show that what had happened in his backyard could happen on a larger scale. From England to Central America, from the prairie fields of North Dakota to the stifling heat of Ghana, Montgomery caught glimpses of farmers whose inventiveness had made their soil much more fertile and sustainable while – very importantly – making their farms more profitable.

“What really turned me into an optimist was seeing farmers around the world who had done it – both on large farms in North America and on smaller subsistence farms in Costa Rica and Africa,” he said. “These conservation agriculture principles scale and they can be adapted from small-scale farms to really large commodity crop farms. They can work on organic farms, they can work on conventional farms.”

Following Montgomery's presentation, Oil Springs-area farmer Mike Belan, whose father adopted no-till practices over 25 years ago, said the author was spot-on about many of the issues.

“He absolutely speaks the truth about the interaction with soil and plants and how agriculture has got to change the way we do things,” he said. “My dad started no-till in 1991. At that time it was because of financial reasons – we were downsizing and wanted a cheaper way to farm. But what we've learned in the last five or six years about soil health, what a blessing it was that he started no-till that long ago. With the addition of cover crops, we can see the organic matter building. When we were just no-tilling you could almost see the yield was at a plateau. But now with cover crops, just like he said, we can see more with less inputs.”

Belan said his own experience proves conservation agriculture can be done successfully.

“We're above the county averages on yields, consistently.”

But there are impediments in Lambton that would make widespread use of the tenets of conservation agriculture difficult, Belan added.

“It would be hard in this region, simply because we have so many farmers that work off the farm and they just don't have time to farm cover crops,” he said. “It takes a whole other set of management skills to farm with cover crops with no-till, because you do have to fight the weather. Plus the cost of land… you need an off-farm job just to pay for the land. It can create a deep hole.”

For Montgomery, though, most problems can be overcome by farmers trusting their own instincts and developing their own methods of how best to manage soil health in their own part of the world.

“The largest farms I visited were 20,000 acres. It's all scales,” he said. “The methods you would use on a large scale farm like that are going to be different than the methods you use on a small market garden in the city. But the principles are the same. It's just figuring out how to tailor those principles to scale. That's why I went to visit some of those big farms in the Dakotas – they're really big, they're using the principles and it's working there.

David Montgomery's books on soil erosion, Dirt, The Hidden Half of Nature and Growing a Revolution are available at Sarnia's The Book Keeper, located at 500 Exmouth St. For more information about Montgomery, visit www.dig2grow.com.